Making the Change: Going Agile at the Department of Labor

Going agile in the government is easy to say and hard to do. Teams and individuals prefer to stay apart and work on their own for weeks or months at a time. Documentation can quickly become more important than working software. Addressing the demands brought on by a change in administration, policy, or executive direction requires teams and individuals to start working together in order to succeed in their overall mission.

This experience report will discuss the benefits, challenges, and outcomes when implementing Kanban in a traditional waterfall and silo working environment. Techniques for creating a continuous change towards an agile way of working will be shared. Performance data from a two year Kanban initiative at the Department of Labor will be reviewed and discussed. Participants will walk away with a clear understanding of how Kanban can break down silos, improve the agility of a traditional waterfall and silo focused organization, and noticeably improve performance.

Colleen Johnson - End to End Kanban for the Whole Organization

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

We often look to our engineering teams first to drive efficiency and speed to deliver but as we optimize the flow of our development processes we quickly create pressure in the organizational workflow with the activities that feed into and out of product delivery. Product definition struggles to keep pace and establish a queue of viable options to pull from. Marketing efforts begin to pile up as features release faster than we can share the news. All of this stems from optimizing only one part of the overall system. In this talk we will look at how to scale Kanban practices to the entire organization to provide the visibility, flexibility and predictability to make every part of the business truly agile.

Chris Li - Missing the point about Backlog Item Estimation

schedule 6 months ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Have you spent a lot of energy and time with your teams focusing on estimation? Do you feel that everyone isn't quite on the same page? There are many challenges on teams who wish to work with an agile mindset, and negative patterns around estimation can have quite the impact on productivity and team morale.

In this workshop, participants will revisit what a Product Backlog Item represents and exactly what an estimate represents. Using this as a foundation, session participants will learn about four distinct parts of a pattern that repeats itself in organizations who may not have a strong handle on these concepts. The workshop concludes with a lightweight estimation exercise that participants can take back to their organization.

Having a better understanding of estimation is helpful, and having a simple yet powerful game to compare items relatively to one another will help break your teams of the pattern of misunderstanding the point of backlog item estimation.

Melinda Solomon - From Pandemonium to Predictable: Managing the Chaos of Success

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Beginner

We often aim for success and welcome it with open arms.But, sometimes success comes more quickly than you anticipate, and demand for services exceeds your capacity to deliver.The result can be missed commitments, high stress, and inability to forecast with clarity.As quickly as your brand shines, it can tarnish with your inability to keep up.Basically your dreams become your nightmare.

This is the story of a small little training program for a transforming enterprise that consisted of a single class and an instructor.Within 3 years it had grown to 12 courses and 6 instructors with a waiting list for seats.People wanted more courses and more offerings of the existing courses.People were asking for us to attend events and summits and briefings. As demand surged we began to fall into a pattern of unreliable service and delivery with a completely unsustainable work/life balance.

In the midst of the chaos we became inspired by the IT software development model of Kanban.While we're engaged in non-IT knowledge work, we became convinced an implementation of a proto-kanban management system could save our reputation.The Kanban management method saved our business when the chaos of success was drowning us.And it can help you too!

schedule 6 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Innovation Labs often don’t create the impact they’ve promised and many eventually fail. Capital One’s Innovation Lab, founded in 2011, has evolved to stay relevant throughout the years. In this session, Amber King, Senior Manager of Accelerator Operations talks about how the Labs' operating model has changed over the years, the details of how the Lab's new accelerator model works, how we incorporate Lean Start-up, Design Thinking, Google Design Sprints, Scrum, and Kanban techniques on our teams and what has triggered the need to reinvent the Labs' model in order to continue to push for disruptive innovation.

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

A deeper insight in how and why agile works is the pre-requisite for business agility and the agile organization. Flow thinking has proven to be foundational. But the concept of flow is not an easy concept to master for people that have not experienced it. Rational explanations of flow only go so far. Without intuitive understanding based on experience it may not be easy to mobilize a team or organization into action. By visualizing work, reducing multi-tasking, and removing obstacles, lead times may be drastically reduced leading to better outcomes.

Introducing the Okaloa Flowlab board game-- an exciting new approach to learning how to think about flow through practice and simulation. With Okaloa Flowlab we will perform a series of experiments through board-play style simulations that reflect real work environments. This session provides a quick introduction into what is typically a three-hour interactive class. In order to fit into the 45-minute timeframe, we will provide a “before” vs “after” game play rather than introducing agile policies incrementally, but the end result will be the same.

We first simulate a conventional work environment that reflects a “mechanistic” mindset characterized by a focus on resource efficiency, command and control, and specialist workers, so that participants will viscerally experience which roadblocks need to be overcome. We will then implement a number of agile policies and practices (including pull of work, peer collaboration and limiting the amount of work in process) and observe the results.

This learning session enables attendees to experience first-hand the effect of adopting agile processes in a safe-to-fail simulated environment.

Each team consists of 3-5 people seated around a table with the board (ideally 4 people and 1 person taking up the role of project coordinator).

Participants will discover the power of visualization, limiting work in process and collaboration, and understand the fundamental difference between resource efficiency and flow efficiency.

Come check out this exciting and innovative new way to learn about agility!

Paul Boos - Understanding Agile & Lean Coaching

schedule 7 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Advanced

So you are considering getting a coach to help you in your transition to Agile. Or perhaps you are an Agile practitioner considering becoming an Agile coach. What do these Agile coaches do? What makes them different?

This session will enter the foyer of the house that describes what coaches do and considerations one can have when they think about coaching (including hiring one). Prepare to be challenged and to learn a bit of what it takes to be or work with a coach; it has little to do with courses or certifications, though they may help. In covering what coaches do, one can now begin to think along the lines of what the skills one may need to improve.

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Software development is hard. For all our talk about “sprints,” anyone who has been involved in a major software development effort will agree it is more of a marathon. Well, if we have to run a marathon, wouldn’t it be nice to start on mile marker 2? Some inline skates would be nice, as well!

In this talk we will describe a new technique for jump-starting application development, with software seeds and generators.

A seed project pre-integrates a set of technologies, with a minimal working set of services and screens, a set of example automated tests and a fully tricked-out DevOps pipeline. Like an erector set (or a Raspberry Pi Maker Kit—to use a more up-to-date analogy), a seed is designed to be used for building larger projects.

A generator can be used to generate a new project (by customizing seed templates, for example), and, later on, to generate new software components from blueprints as they are needed. Like a casting mold for molten metal, a generator helps ensure new components follow naming, testing, and design conventions.

A properly configured set of seed and generator projects can provide a number of important benefits:

new project team members can explore and learn using a project small-enough to get their arms around.

New insights, components, and design patterns can be quickly promulgated and shared within and across organizations

Of course, all this does not come for free. Seeds and generators must be regularly maintained, and they require senior expertise to build and maintain them. However, even a junior team can derive benefit from downloading a pre-existing example from one of the many online sources such as yeoman.io.

In this talk we will explore the process for building and maintaining seeds and generators using a case study of three seed projects developed for a NYC municipal agency using Ruby on Rails, Microsoft C# .NET Core, and AngularJS 4, technologies. We will talk about the lessons learned, commonalities and differences between technology stacks and what it takes to maintain the seeds and generators long-term. We will also talk about our experiences using the seeds and generators to build production applications and helping other groups to do the same. We will discuss the issue of achieving buy-in, even from development groups that did not participate in the initial seed development. Finally, we will explore next steps and speculate on where the next major leaps in software development productivity may come from.

NOTE: This talk can be delivered at the intermediate or advanced level, depending on the audience

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Case Study

Intermediate

You are adopting Agile practices throughout your organization, and you set up a shiny new set of tools to support it. All of your teams have captured their backlog and are running their Sprints (Scrum) or continuous-flow (Kanban) process. Great! There is only one problem. How can management see at a glance what is going on in each effort?

How do we know if each effort is “on track” or headed for disaster?

How do we know when we have capacity to take on new initiatives?

If a new high priority/urgent initiative is proposed, how can we quickly see if it would impact other efforts at the same or higher business priority?

If a new high priority/urgent initiative must be undertaken, how can we quickly analyze resources and schedules for what is happening currently, so we can do an impact analysis?

How can we avoid getting bogged down in the day-to-day minutiae of user stories, story points, and bugs and quickly identify important blockers, major risks, or emerging trends that could have ripple effects?

Through a case study involving a $1B municipal government agency, we will describe the process of configuring a set of tools to feed a one-page dashboard displaying current and proposed initiatives – enabling management decision-making. The tools include Atlassian JIRA, BitBucket, Bamboo, and LeanKit, but the lessons may be applied to other similar toolchains. We analyze both the technical work involved, as well as the important process and cultural changes we had to make in order for this to happen. All changes automatically roll up from the team level to the portfolio level, so that progress, blockages, and risks are always visible. Senior management can drill down to get details if needed.

Joey Spooner - What happens when you use the Kanban Method to manage your business?

schedule 6 months ago

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45 Mins

Experience Report

Beginner

Running a small business is no small task. Financial management, sales, hiring, managing people, and supporting existing clients are just a handful of activities a small business might address in a single day. So what happens when you use the Kanban Method to manage your business?

I’ll share my experiences while training, coaching, and evolving a small business using the Kanban Method. You’ll see how the Method quickly surfaced issues, revealed hidden opportunities for innovation, and how the business is using the Method to mature the services they offer.

Manjit Singh - What Effective Agile Contracts Look Like

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

The Agile Manifesto has been around for over 16 years. That seems like enough time for organizations to adapt to Agile processes and get the hang of writing Agile contracts. Yet, when it comes time for US Federal Agencies to enter into a contract about Agile work processes and deliverables, we're still seeing Waterfall language persist.

If we want to see Agile software development contracts that are truly aligned for the best interests of all parties involved, there are a few steps that we need to take. Learn what these steps are in this presentation.

Manjit Singh - The Art of "Discovering" Product Features

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Product discovery is a process that helps us make sure we're not just creating products that are usable, but also useful. The notion of requirements and design as a sequential, predictable and scheduled phase in a product development process is so ingrained in our industry that it’s often one of the most difficult habits for product organizations to break. Product organizations need to come to terms with the fact that the product invention process is fundamentally a creative process. It is more art than science. The session will present an opportunity to learn techniques in interactive, hands-on exercises.

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

What does it take to build an award winning enterprise mobile app that serves millions of customers? How to keep scaling the platform and delivering values to customers frequently, reliably and with quality while keeping the team happy and engaged?

Beyond coding, there are important pieces of puzzle that have to come together. This presentation offers a case study of our journey from launching the flagship mobile app for one of the country’s top financial institutions to growing the platform that consistently ships and innovates. Through our experience, the audience can gain key insights into the challenges we faced and the decisions and commitments we made along the way to foster a culture that values shipping, innovation, continuous improvement, and keeps it fun in the process.

Arlen Bankston - Agile HR & People Operations

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Human Resources is critical to creating and nurturing a truly agile environment, and with positions like CHRO becoming ever more prominent, better positioned to make a real difference. How can HR practitioners apply agile principles both to their own work, and to strengthening the overall adaptability and appeal of the organizations they support?

This session will explore topics from Arlen's forthcoming book The Leader's Guide to Agile HR & People Operations through a smidgen of talking and a bevy of entertaining and (largely) practical exercises.

Anand Francis - From zero to transformed!

schedule 8 months ago

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45 Mins

Experience Report

Advanced

Successful Agile transformations are cultural transformations where the ‘doing agile’ comes from ‘being agile’. Transformations are qualitative experiences which are notoriously difficult to measure and track without getting into comparisons. And we all know when you compare agile teams using metrics everyone loses.

We here in Capital One Commercial Bank took a unique approach to the opportunity. We decided that we are not going to have a transformation goal but multiple self-identified transformation goals for each team and organization.

We feel we have an approach that meets each team where they are on their agile journey and lets them identify their own path forward. And as agile coaching partners, we provide guidance along the way. To this end, we guide the teams through a self-assessment that help them identify opportunities across the following five categories.

The approach is nonjudgmental and does not focus on roles or people but focuses on the agile experience felt by each agile team member. Teams/Organizations then choose for themselves with a little guidance what are their transformation goals and as coaching partners, we help them achieve it. We assess the organization again after a fixed period of time and look for measurable improvement in experiences. Based on new and historic data we help modify or change the transformation goals and pursue it with them.

In our experience, the transformation when presented this way becomes an opportunity and not a burden. We strongly believe that the transformation is everyone's responsibility and that everyone wants to be the best.